Sen. Mike Lee on the Biden WH Efforts to Renew & Expand Domestic Spying. The US’ Long History of Silencing Israel Critics—on Campus, Media, & Beyond
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Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight...
The United States exploited the fears that emerged after the 9-11 attacks in multiple ways.
While the wars it started and the torture camps it installed around the world have largely come to an end some 20 years later, many of the most repressive and authoritarian domestic powers seized in the name of that terrorist attack endured to this very day.
One obvious example is the Patriot Act enacted in the days and weeks after that attack and which was promised to be temporary.
Yet every four years since, the Congress has reauthorized and renewed the Patriot Act and now does so with virtually no debate, ensuring that what was once acknowledged even after the 9-11 attack to be a radical expansion of state power has now simply become normalized, part of our political woodwork.
The same is true of the claim power grab that the U.S.
claimed at first in secret and then in the open of the right to spy on the international communications of American citizens without even having so much as to get a warrant first, one of the core constitutional protections of the Fourth Amendment.
This is a power that the Bush-Cheney administration originally claimed in secret in early 2002.
Once the New York Times won a Pulitzer for revealing the existence of that illegal spying program in 2005, the U.S.
Congress, under the leadership of Nancy Pelosi, Acted to codify and legalize that Bush-Cheney warrantless domestic spying power by enacting Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008.
The terms of that law required that it be renewed every five years precisely because allowing our government to spy on our communications with no warrants was originally controversial and yet since it has been renewed.
In 2013, the Obama administration demanded renewal with no reforms and got it on a bipartisan vote.
In 2018, Democrats like Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff joined with numerous congressional Republicans to give the Donald Trump administration the same vast domestic spying powers.
In other words, even while Adam Schiff and Nancy Pelosi were accusing Donald Trump of being a fascist and a new Hitler, they acted to ensure that the same Trump administration enjoyed these virtually unlimited spying powers on American citizens.
Obviously, these powers are vested in the U.S.
security state, the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, and that's the reason establishment wings of each party supports them.
Now we're five years later, 2023, and the law is again up for renewal.
This time, however, there is a serious bipartisan coalition.
Enraged by how many times now the FBI has been caught abusing these spying powers that has consolidated in an attempt to oppose meaningful reforms on these powers as a condition for their renewal.
Last week we had on our program Congressman Thomas Massey, the Republican of Kentucky, to warn that pro-spying members of both political parties are attempting to work with the Biden White House not only to ensure quick approval Of this spying power with no reform, but also to expand those spying powers even further while a anti-spying coalition of Democrats and Republicans works on the Judiciary Committee to try and reform it.
Senator Mike Lee, the Republican Senator from Utah, is now vocally warning about that attempt to expand the spying powers.
And he'll be with us in just a few minutes tonight to discuss the prospects for stopping this bill and the reason it's so dangerous.
And then, we have extensively covered on this show since October 7th the glaring abandonment of principle at many conservatives, especially those who have long posed and branded as free speech champions, as they attempt in the wake of the attack on Israel to usher in a wide range of censorship measures and classic cancel culture in the United States all in the name of shielding Israel from criticism.
Many conservatives have actually been consistent about this and denounced all this, but many on the pro-Israel right who cheer all of this don't even deny that it's a radical contradiction of their stated views and current actions.
They admit, yes, we've always said we're against censorship and now We're demanding it.
We're advocating it.
And the reason they claim is that they are simply finally using the left's censorship tactics against them.
Finally forcing American liberals to live under the cancellation and censorship frameworks they have imposed on everyone else.
That's the excuse.
And while that sentiment may be understandable, there's a major problem with the claim.
Namely, censorship against Israel critics in the United States, in academia, in media, and in the corporate world is not new.
In fact, it's been going on for many, many years in the United States.
And we'll show you the very long history of how aggressive and extreme this censorship in the United States has been in the name of protecting Israel and silencing its most vocal critics.
Silencing and punishing Israel's American critics is not some new tactic now being used as tit-for-tat against left-wing censorship as I kept hearing.
It has long been one of the most common and pervasive forms of censorship in the United States, with many on the right, including those who have vocally championed free speech and presented themselves as free speech warriors, a kind of censorship they've long ignored, if not outright cheered.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update starting right now.
There's probably no issue on which I have focused more as a journalist than the issue of illegal, warrantless domestic spying in mass perpetrated by the United States warrantless domestic spying in mass perpetrated by the United States government on the American population.
And as we've recounted before, the history of the U.S.
security state embedded in it was the idea that the U.S.
security state will always be directed exclusively to foreign countries and never directed inward.
And it was after 9-11, when really for the first time in mass, The U.S.
security state, the powers of the NSA and the CIA and the FBI started being focused overwhelmingly on the domestic population.
Obviously, the FBI had abused its powers domestically before, but never in the systemic way that 9-11 permitted.
And it wasn't just in the year or two when fears were high when it happened.
That was when those fears were exploited to justify the imposition of these new powers, and yet they never went away.
The assurance at the time was, oh, don't worry.
This is very temporary just to get this crisis of terrorism under control.
And once we do, we're going to give those powers back.
And of course, that never happened.
Now, we're going to have Senator Mike Leon in just a little bit because it's time for a very important new vote about whether to extend these warrantless spying powers used against American citizens for another five years.
And there's a real chance this time Just stop it.
But at the same time, there is a bipartisan effort underway in conjunction with the White House, the Biden White House, not only to extend those powers, but to dangerously expand them even further than they've ever been up until this point.
Just to give you the critical context for what we're talking about here, this was the story that happened just a month, basically, maybe a little bit longer after I first began working as a journalist and writing about politics, and it became the thing on which I focused for the next year and a half.
It was an expose by the New York Times at the end of December 2005, the headline of which was, Bush Lets the United States Spy on Callers Without Courts.
And you can see the headline up on that screen if we go ahead and put that up there.
The core of the story was exactly this, that for the first time the United States government was ordered by the White House to spy on the calls of American citizens without going to courts first, without getting warrants.
That's the fundamental safeguard of the Fourth Amendment to the United States.
Yes, of course our government sometimes needs to spy on citizens.
But they have to go first to get a warrant in order to justify that.
And yet in the weeks and months after 9-11, as the article points out, the government under George Bush authorized it to spy on Americans' international calls or emails with no warrant.
Quote, months after the September 11th attacks, President Bush secretly authorized the NSA to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying, according to government officials.
Under a presidential order signed in 2002, the intelligence agency has monitored the international telephone calls and international emails of hundreds, perhaps thousands of people inside the United States without warrants over the past three years.
And of course, their effort was, their claim to be, to stop terrorism.
And we, of course, found out that international.
It was used in far more pervasive ways than that.
Quote, under a presidential order signed in 2002, the intelligence agency has monitored the international telephone calls and international email messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands of people.
The previously undisclosed decision to permit some eavesdropping inside the country without court approval was a major shift in American intelligence gathering practices.
Particularly for the NSA, whose mission is to spy on communications abroad.
As a result, some officials familiar with the continuing operation have questioned whether the surveillance has stretched, if not crossed, constitutional limits on legal searches.
Quote, this is really a sea change, said a former senior official who specializes in national security.
Quote, it's almost a mainstay of this country that the NSA only does foreign searches.
And so many of the whistleblowers of the war on terror who came forward to reveal incriminating secrets to journalists, including Edward Snowden, but many others as well, did so primarily because they were so offended, having been inculcated with this principle, that the NSA was never going to be turned on the American citizenry, that it has now been, and it's such a grave violation of the Constitution in its most basic sense, that that was why so many of them came forward.
In Snowden's case, it was also because James Clapper got caught lying directly to the Senate by denying the mass spying programs that Edward Snowden had the evidence of in his hands.
In 2008, when the Democrats controlled the House under the House leadership of Nancy Pelosi, instead of Holding George Bush and Dick Cheney and those officials liable, accountable for having spied on Americans without the warrants required by the constitutional law, they instead enacted a law designed to retroactively legalize that program, knowing that it was likely a Democratic president was coming in 2009.
We were at the end of the Bush administration.
There you see it.
Controversial FISA Amendments Act of 2008 signed into law.
One of the things it did was it gave immunity to the telecoms for having handed over huge amounts of our data to the government without any subpoena or warrants, even though that was illegal.
It just immunized the telecoms, which of course were financing both parties.
But what it also did was enact Section 702, which allows the government to spy on the international calls of Americans and read their emails, Without warrants, as long as they claim that the American is not the target.
Oh, we were just targeting a foreign national?
It just so happened we kept reading the emails of this American citizen and therefore we didn't need a warrant under Section 702.
Because of how controversial it was, it was intended to expire every five years.
It expired and then was renewed under President Obama in 2013.
It was renewed again in 2018 under Donald Trump by a bipartisan vote.
And now it's time to have it renewed again.
Earlier this year, the New York Times anticipated this fight.
And there you see the headline, Security Agencies and Congress Brace for Fight Over Expiring Surveillance Law.
Let's get that headline up on the screen.
Quote, skepticism about security agencies and surveillance by Republicans allied with former President Donald Trump may bolster traditional liberal and libertarian critics of a post-September 11th law.
Attacked in the Russia investigation, Mr. Trump has stoked his supporters to distrust national security agencies and FISA.
Applications for court orders to wiretap Carter Page, a former advisor to his campaign, were riddled with errors and omissions, an inspector general found.
Look at how the New York Times goes out of its way to defend the FBI.
A FBI lawyer actually pled guilty for those omissions to try and get a warrant to spy on Donald Trump's former campaign advisor, Carter Page.
And has been caught abusing this law over and over.
That's the reason why so many Republicans are now joining traditional liberals and wanting reforms on this law.
Quote, The House Judiciary Committee, which shares jurisdiction over FISA with the Intelligence Committee, is led by Representative Jim Jordan, an Ohio Republican and a Trump ally.
He told Fox News last fall, quote, I think we should not even reauthorize FISA, which is going to come in the next Congress.
This is why these changes on the American right, ushered in by Donald Trump, are so crucial.
They opened up, for the first time since the end of World War II, a very serious faction that is highly skeptical of the U.S.
security state, and that makes real reform quite plausible, quite viable, and that's the reason why we're going to have a Republican senator on in just a few minutes, not a Democratic senator, to talk about the urgency of limiting these spying powers.
Here from Lawfare in May 2023, and Lawfare is one of the most pro-FBI, pro-NSA sites around, unsealed surveillance court document reveals how much there has been a misuse of these 702 powers, these warrantless spying powers.
Over and over these powers have been misused.
On May 19th, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which oversees the FBI's surveillance authority known as 702, unsealed a memorandum of opinion and order revealing that the FBI improperly used the 702 database 278,000 times.
The FBI improperly queried crime victims, suspects in the January 6th insurrection, and people arrested at protests stemming from the police killing of George Floyd.
And according to unsealed documents, so both left and right anti-establishment protests, that's always who the targets are of US security state abuses, spying abuses.
Another case included a batch query of 19,000 donors to an unnamed and ultimately unsuccessful congressional candidate.
Now, in 2013, in 2018, what happened was the House of Representatives on a bipartisan basis overcame opposition and they just renewed this law with no reforms.
What's happening now is even more pernicious.
As I said, when we had Congressman Massey on our show, he warned us.
He said, I'm on the Judiciary Committee.
There's bipartisan support in the Judiciary Committee for imposing serious limits on this power and not renewing it until it has that.
The Intelligence Committee, however, and these are my words, which is always captured by the Intelligence Committee.
They always make sure to staff the Intelligence Committee.
with the loyalists to the CIA and the FBI.
The Republicans have Michael McCaul there, who's a big supporter of the war in Ukraine, a big CIA supporter.
He supports wars all the time.
Congressman Massey warned that the Intelligence Committee, which has dual authority over this process, is preparing a bill that will extend, if not strengthen, these powers without any reforms.
And that's exactly what's happening.
Here from the Zwilljen blog, which covers these issues very, very much in detail, the House Intelligence Committee FISA reform bill would greatly expand the class of businesses and other entities required to assist in FISA 702 surveillance.
So, So they're issuing this warning that it's not just this time that the bill might extend it for another five years with zero reforms despite how much evidence there is of how often the FBI abuses it.
Instead, they seem like they're looking to expand it even more.
Now, what has happened is every single time There's a cycle of this bill.
I'll tell you the same exact thing happens.
First, you have enormous evidence that the FBI and other agencies have radically abused these powers.
And then they go to the Congress and they say, we need these legislative authorities renewed.
We need to keep spying on Americans with no warrants.
And some members of Congress say, what do you mean you need a extension of these powers?
We have all this evidence that you've We've been abusing it, not in a few cases, but in huge numbers.
Why would we give you these powers again?
And they always say the same thing.
Oh, the FBI has instituted reforms to prevent it from happening again.
And then they get the powers, and again, there's evidence that they abused it.
So, Christopher Wray, the FBI director, was, before the Senate, and Mike Lee, who you're about to hear from, questioned him on exactly this point.
You always say the FBI has now reformed these powers.
Why should we believe you this time?
Don't worry about it.
We've got this taken care of.
We've got new procedures.
It's going to be different now.
It's never different.
You haven't changed.
And you keep referring to these policies, these new procedures.
We haven't seen that.
We're not even allowed to have access to it.
And we have absolutely no reason to trust you.
Because you haven't behaved in a manner that's trustworthy.
You can't even, as we sit here, tell me that people who intentionally, knowingly, deliberately violated the civil rights of American citizens That they were fired or that they had their security clearance stripped.
Now in 2022, FBI and other agencies searched Americans' communications over 200,000 times, only 16 of which were evidence of a crime only searches that returned information.
I'd like to ask you to give a yes or a no answer to these questions.
Were the three related batch queries consisting of over 23,000 separate queries Relating to the events of January 6th.
Were those evidence of a crime only queries yes or no?
I don't know the answer to that.
The answer is no.
I do know the answer.
The answer is no.
Were the 141 queries for the activists arrested in connection with the George Floyd protests here in Washington DC evidence of a crime only queries?
Those were non-compliant queries and again they all predate the reforms that we've put in place.
So non-compliant queries mean illegal queries.
What he's saying is those are Ways the FBI used these spying powers, weren't with spying powers, non-compliantly.
Meaning, it didn't comply with the law.
Meaning, it was illegal.
It was a crime.
And they always try and describe it that way.
Oh, these are just non-compliant.
And Senator Lee went through all these different instances of the FBI director Admitting that the FBI abused his powers in these non-compliant ways, meaning illegal ways.
Let's listen to the rest.
It was that a work requirement or prohibition relating donors to a political campaign.
The answer there is no.
Washington DC evidence of a crime only queries.
Those were non-compliant queries and again they all predate the reforms that we've put in place which Which echo other reforms that other FBI directors have told me about every darn year.
How about the 19,000 donors to a political campaign?
The answer there is no.
What about the query for a sitting member of Congress?
The answer there is no.
What about the query involving a U.S.
Senator, which for all we know could be any one of us?
The answer is no.
And so what does that tell me?
Well, what I'm hearing and what these data points all point to is that a warrant requirement or prohibition relating to quote-unquote evidence of a crime only queries would not have been something that would have prevented any of the most egregious examples of the abuse that we've seen under Section 702.
So, The FBI is already required to obtain a court order in some circumstances before accessing the contents of Americans Communications in the context of 702.
They're already required for that in some circumstances.
Since 2018, how many times has that requirement been triggered according to government reporting?
Do you know?
Are you talking about the so-called F2?
Yes.
How many times has it been triggered?
Yes.
This has always been the crux of the issue.
The Bush-Tinney administration said, you know what, the reason we're going to start spying on Americans' calls without warrants is because it's just too annoying to have to go and get a warrant.
The reality is there's nothing easier than going to get a warrant.
If you go and look at how many times the FISA court, which is the court, the secret court, it meets in secret, it's inside the Justice Department.
It has only the Justice Department there, only the FBI there.
And as a result, it's a bizarre court.
It's a court that is intended to rubber stamp the government's request for warrants.
It has given and approved warrants in something like 99.8% of the cases since this process began.
And the only times it rejected it, it didn't say no.
It just said, oh, you have some more information you have to provide in your form.
Come back to us.
And then it rubber stamps it.
There's nothing easier in the world than the FBI spying on Americans by telling the FISA court it means to because there's no one there to contest what the FBI is saying.
All the incentives are for the FISA judge to say yes because if a judge ever says no on a warrant, And something happens, the FBI will go and say they have blood on their hands.
It's a rubber stamping process as it is.
And the FBI insists and the executive branch insists that it can't even comply with those very minimal safeguards.
And of course, when you give up agency spying power with no safeguards, you know what's going to happen.
It's going to abuse it continuously.
And that is what the FBI has been doing since the very first moment it got its hands on these powers.
Here is one of the experts who follows this legislation as closely as anybody, Elizabeth Gotthein, who's with the Brennan Center, and she went on to Twitter yesterday, along with Senator Lee and others, and warned that this House Intelligence Bill presented by the Republican majority, together with Democrats who are on that committee, Are not only trying to renew it, but are trying to expand it.
She said, red alert, buried in the House Intelligence Committee section 702 quote reform bill, which is scheduled for a four vote as soon as tomorrow, is the biggest expansion of surveillance inside the United States since the Patriot Act.
That's what that Senate, the House Intelligence Committee is trying to do.
Because they put people on that committee captured by the Intelligence Committee.
Here is Senator Ron Wyden, who has a long time been a defender of civil liberties, but from the Democratic Party.
He's the one who asked James Clapper in 2013 whether the NSA was spying on American citizens en masse, and that's what provoked Clapper to lie, which in turn is what caused Edward Snowden to come forward.
Senator Wyden said the same thing, quote, right now the government has to go through a phone or email provider to spy using 702.
The House Intelligence Bill would change that by forcing anyone providing public Wi-Fi, hotels, coffee shops, bookstores, to unknowingly help the government do this without a warrant.
And he goes and says the potential for abuse here is staggering.
Now, the last time this was brought up for a vote was in 2018.
And Republicans were split on it because you had a lot of Republicans who were concerned about FBI, CIA spying because they had seen it be used illegally, weaponized as part of the election.
And there was no way the Republicans could get This legislation passed.
The executive branch always wants this warrantless spying.
These warrantless spying powers extended.
The FBI, the CIA, the NSA start saying, oh, if you don't give us these spying powers, you're all going to die in a terrorist attack.
Today, 45 former intelligence agency operatives of intelligence agencies, many of whom were the same people who signed that letter by 51 former intelligence operatives, right before the 2020 election, spreading the lie that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation, today signed a letter warning that we were all going to be in danger.
If we didn't extend this immediately, this was exactly the argument they used in 2018, and you had enough Democrats, including Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff at the time, claiming that Donald Trump was a fascist and a new Hitler, voting to give the Trump administration, the executive branch, these same warrantless spying programs.
So we'll see if 2023 and into 2024 is going to be different.
There seems to be a lot more of a momentum to stop at this time, although there's a clear movement underway working with the Biden White House in conjunction with the Intelligence Committee to do something worse, not just extend it, but to make it even more pervasive.
These spying powers even more potent with no Safeguards.
Now, Mike Lee is a United States Senator.
He is the senior senator representing the state of Utah as a Republican.
It's an office he's held since 2011.
And as part of his position on the Senate Judiciary Committee, as well as with his substantial background in constitutional law, including clerking for the U.S.
Supreme Court, Senator Lee has long been a vocal proponent of individual privacy and an opponent of unlimited domestic government spying, particularly without warrants as 702 Permit.
So he sounded the alarm.
He was one of the people to sound the alarm today about just how dangerous this new house intelligence legislation would be if it were passed.
And we are delighted to welcome him to the program to talk to us about all of this tonight.
We have him by audio only, but you'll be able to hear him perfectly.
Senator, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us.
Oh, thank you, Glenn.
It's good to be with you.
Yeah, good to have you.
So I had on my program last week Congressman Thomas Massey of Kentucky, who, like you, is an opponent of renewing these authorities without reforms.
And he was warning.
He said, look, there's a lot of bipartisan support for reforms on the House Judiciary Committee.
The problem is the House Intelligence Committee seems to be working very hard to extend it without reforms.
And it turns out their bill would do Something far worse than that, far worse than simply extending it.
You sounded the alarm.
What is it about this bill that you find so problematic?
Okay, so the House Intelligence Committee bill, the HIPC as we call that committee, is doubly bad.
Number one, it extends out the authorization period for FISA 702 by nine years.
To my knowledge, we've never had an authorization for FISA that long.
Number two, it does so without any generally applicable warrant requirement.
It purports to have a warrant requirement for a narrow subset of backdoor searches on American citizens, but they've written it in such a way that it would have practically zero effect.
It wouldn't really have any practical effect because they can always get around this very narrow type of search.
Where it's focused exclusively on evidence of a crime with nothing having to do with an actual national security investigation.
But it's so much worse than that.
The third big problem with the HPSC bill, and this is the granddaddy of them all, is found in Section 504.
In Section 504, this would vastly magnify the domestic surveillance capability and the ability of our intelligence gathering agencies to collect warrantless surveillance on American citizens without probable cause in the United States by expanding the reach of 702 into things like public Wi-Fi's at hotels,
Restaurants, coffee shops, bookstores, anything like that.
All of a sudden, the intelligence gathering agencies could go to those entities that offer public Wi-Fi service, demand without a warrant, all the data that crossed through those public Wi-Fi stations.
And they could do that without ever going to court, without ever having to demonstrate probable cause or otherwise going through the steps of acquiring a warrant.
This is bad.
They're claiming that they're fixing the problem, and they're actually making the problem worse.
And this is appalling.
This is why this bill is something I've been describing as a Trojan horse, appropriately so, and it needs to be dismissed as such.
Senator, one of the experiences that I've had as a journalist most frustrating is I've been following this program since it was first revealed in 2005, this warrantless eavesdropping program.
And the history of it is always the same.
You have years of reports, and I don't mean media reports, but inside the government, inspectors general and the like, proving abuse of these spying powers, major abuse.
And then every year when the FBI comes or the U.S.
government, the executive branch comes to Congress and says, we need a renewal of it immediately, no reforms, they're asked, well, you keep abusing the law, why would it be different?
And every time they say, oh no, don't worry, we instituted internal reforms that will Prevent any abuses this time and then the cycle repeats itself.
We showed your exchange part of it with FBI director Christopher Wray, but what are some of the abuses a that you've seen Recently and then be that you are concerned about it for the law in that form gets enacted OK, so some of the abuses that we know happened that have been verified include doing backdoor searches on at least one member of the United States Senate, at least one member of the U.S.
House of Representatives, backdoor searches also just to the tune of hundreds of thousands.
Some have said we're now up to millions of documented warrantless backdoor searches on American citizens.
And I assume you know what I mean when I refer to that, a backdoor search on the 702 database is directed at electronic communications stored by NSA, collected under 702, ostensibly under the auspices of a foreign intelligence surveillance investigation.
But when they've got the substantive contents of what an American said of those conversations, if they go in and search specifically for what the American said, using that American's phone number or email address or something like that, that ought to require a warrant. - Right.
Now, under their procedures, they're not supposed to be able to do that willy-nilly just for kicks and giggles, and yet they do.
And they have done it millions and millions of times.
As you correctly pointed out—I'm glad you showed some of the exchange I had with Christopher Wray when I cross-examined him on that last week—it did not go particularly well for him, in part because he had the audacity to make the same darn argument these guys have been making to me for 13 years.
Which is to say, we've got internal procedures that will make sure that those are not misused.
And yet every year they say the same thing, and every year more of these illegal searches happen.
And in fact, I caught him pointing out some of the examples that he pointed to.
For some of these illegal searches.
He said these all happened before we adopted these procedures.
We went in and looked those up after the hearing, and we concluded that there were several instances that he pointed to that actually had happened after his most recent policies.
As far as the hypothetical ones, the ones that we can't yet prove, but that I fear either are occurring regularly or might well happen in the future, or some combination of those two things, Involve what we might call reverse targeting.
You can't target an American citizen to be the target under FISA 702.
That has to be a foreign national operating on foreign soil.
But you can incidentally collect communications with the foreign national who is on foreign soil of an American citizen on American soil.
And so it's entirely possible what they could be doing or what they could do in the future is reverse target by saying, oh, look, we know that Glenn talks to foreign nationals A, B, C, and D. Let's open up a FISA 702 set of searches, an investigation under FISA 702 on individuals A, B, C, and D, knowing that Glenn talks to them.
On that basis, they pull in any conversations you may have with those foreign nationals, and then they can go back in and do a backdoor search of your communications with them when that may have been their intent all along is to get your communications without a warrant.
Yeah, exactly.
This was, of course, something that was talked about a lot when it was first enacted in 2008.
They said, no, don't worry.
There's provisions in there that prevent us from doing this.
And yet they've gotten caught doing it so many times.
And the question of intent What are they really looking for?
The people with whom I'm speaking and they just happen to be finding mine all the time?
Or they're really just looking through mine in a backdoor kind of way?
It's almost impossible to prove, but what we know is they end up spying on Americans and reading our communications with no warrants of any kind.
Now let me ask you about the politics of this.
I remember right when we did the Snowden reporting, there was a lot of momentum for bipartisan reform.
It was sponsored by Justin Amash and John Conyers and the House.
It picked up a lot of support quickly.
And at the last second, President Obama got Nancy Pelosi to whip just enough Democratic votes to sabotage reform.
There's an article in Foreign Policy, the headline of which is How Nancy Pelosi Saved the NSA.
There's always been this bipartisan component, this willingness on a bipartisan basis to extend these powers with the kind of Increased skepticism of the U.S.
security state, the FBI, the CIA and the like on the part of large parts of the Republican Party and the American right after they saw what they were willing to do in our elections.
Is there a plausible chance this time that there can be a bipartisan coalition to block renewal without real reforms?
Yeah, look, I think there is a plausible chance here that we could get something actually done.
Because of the fact that they're running out of excuses, all of their arguments that they've used in the past have turned out to be red herrings.
And so I think we could get it done this time.
Let me tell you what worries me most about what could interfere with that this time around.
Number one, the fact that they've put in a temporary extension into the National Defense Authorization Act that would extend this thing to, I think, April 19th of 2024, is troubling.
We need to stop that.
We need to push back on that, in part because there is a certification that's done by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that I'm told once it's put in place, It can run for 365 continuous days, even if Pfizer expires during that time period.
That suggests that this extension, taking this thing to April 19th, 2024, I believe, could in practical effect end up being an extension until April 19th of 2025.
We've got to stop that from happening and get rid of that language.
And if we can get that out, replace it at a bare minimum, if we want a short term extension so that we can iron out exactly what the details ought to look like.
I mean, my first choice would be to just pass the bill that came out of the House Judiciary Committee bill.
If we can't get that done before we have to leave for Christmas, we could consider extending it, but only with the additional caveat not found in the current extension, that would say that any subsequent certification by the FISC May not be operative past the expiration date of FISA 702.
I think that would make a difference.
Last question that I have for you, and I know this is something you've encountered a lot as a civil libertarian, somebody who defends individual privacy rights and the like.
A lot of Americans, ordinary Americans, think, you know what, this doesn't really have much to do with me, even if they're kind of stepping over lines.
I think they're looking for terrorists and criminals, not necessarily for me.
I don't really do anything that would provoke their interest.
Why should ordinary Americans care if the government has safeguards on the way they can spy on American citizens?
Well, first of all, you should worry about it for the same reason that you worry about people going hungry, even if those people are not likely to be you.
You should worry about it for the simple reason that whenever government overacts, it does so at the expense of individual liberty.
And when it does so at the expense of individual liberty, even if you think it's not likely to be your individual liberty compromised by it, That doesn't mean that it won't be you the next time.
It doesn't mean that in a few short days, weeks, months, years, or decades, that somebody in the government might want to take advantage of you for whatever reason.
We've seen manipulation of these things in all kinds of strange circumstances, many of which are petty.
We caught a couple of guys doing a search because one of them owned a rental property and they were doing a a backdoor search under 702 because they wanted to check out a prospective tenant.
On another occasion, there was a guy who thought that his father might be having an affair, cheating on his mom.
And so he did a backdoor search under 702 on his dad.
You never know exactly who you know, who might, unbeknownst to you, have access to these databases.
You You never know when somebody you currently know that doesn't now work there might have access to it.
You never know when you might be at the wrong end of some public or private dispute that might result in this.
Any way you look at it, when you start to allow the government to Go after someone to search and seize the information or objects from an American citizen without a warrant.
It's eventually coming to you.
And if not to you today, to at least someone you know and care about today, and you eventually.
It's not worth gambling over this.
We don't play dice with our Fourth Amendment rights.
Nations that have departed from protections like these, You know, because these warrant requirements are something that in one way or another, are supposed to be held in common by everyone whose legal structure traces back to the English common law.
They should all have this in one form or another.
Nations that depart from them have very, very bad consequences for everyone.
Well, Senator, this is something we are definitely going to keep covering.
I'm more excited than ever, I think, since I began covering this about the chances for there to be real reform this time.
I'm very happy that there are people like you in the Congress who are prioritizing this, who have such a mastery of it, and are working hard to at least put some safeguards on the government's ability.
And I really appreciate your taking the time to talk to us about it tonight.
Thank you so much.
Yeah, have a great evening.
So as we have been covering a lot on this show, and I don't think I need to go deeply into it again, given how many times we have covered it, there has been this very disturbing uprise in censorship advocacy there has been this very disturbing uprise in censorship advocacy on the part of the political faction that has spent the last several years.
Taking the forefront in defending free speech and opposing censorship, and that largely has been American conservatives, the American right, libertarians.
When I was on Tucker Carlson's show, on his Twitter show a few weeks ago, to talk about how so many conservatives and people on the right, not all, but so many, Including the people who have prided themselves on being free speech absolutists and free speech champions and people who believe in debate and don't want safe spaces or cancel culture.
How many of them have, in the name of protecting Israel, suddenly become censorship advocates?
Tucker said, you know, he said the thing that concerns me the most.
Is that over the last six, seven years, it has largely been by a twist of bizarre circumstances, the American right that has taken the lead in defending free speech, along with some other people, but not many.
And if the American right is now going to abandon this, as they are doing in large part, In the name of shielding Israel or creating victimhood narratives around American Jews, some of the people who thrive most in the United States, then the question is who will ever have the credibility to defend free speech again?
No one's going to take American conservatives seriously again.
We talked the other night about how Palantir The military and intelligence contractor that sells spying tech and defense weaponry to the Pentagon announced that they were setting aside 180 jobs held exclusively for American Jews who are on college campuses and claim they're unsafe due to anti-Semitism.
Job set-asides for members of minority groups only has been one of the uniting features of anyone identifying as an American conservative.
They hate these sorts of quotas, or affirmative action, or hiring based on demographic groups.
And yet Ben Shapiro went to Twitter and said, I love this.
Because now it's his group getting these benefits, not some other group with which he doesn't identify.
And he went seven hours later once he got attacked by his own followers and said, yeah, you know what?
Maybe it's better if we leave these jobs open to everybody.
Barry Weiss, same thing.
She read this and she wrote, wow.
And this is the kind of abandonment of principle that has been happening since October the 7th.
Dave Rubin made a career out of saying the problem with the West is that it is no longer liberal.
It doesn't believe in liberal values like free thought, free debate, free speech.
And yet when he heard that France was banning all pro-Palestinian protests while leaving it legal to have pro-Israel protests, in other words, it's legal to march in favor of the French government's policy of supporting Israel but not against, Dave Rubin said, oh wow, maybe the West can be saved after all.
We went overnight from the downfall of the West is there's not enough free speech and too much censorship to, oh, the salvation of the West actually is censoring views that I hate, that I find threatening, ones that protect this foreign country.
And I've been relentlessly pointing this out.
And one of the defenses that I keep hearing from people who watch the show who support this or at least acquiescing to it or other conservatives with whom I still have a good working relationship despite disagreement on Israel and these censorship issues is, oh no, we don't really believe in the censorship we're cheering.
We are cheering censorship but we're not doing it because we believe in censorship or we're not really believers in cancel culture even though we're going around putting one head on the pike after the next to people who criticize Israel in ways that were deemed too excessive.
There's a Twitter account called Stop Anti-Semitism and all they do is take pictures of people, obscure people, who Express views that they say is too anti-Israel and they mark their employers and they try and get them fired.
They often do get them fired.
They all celebrate.
The exact kind of cancel culture that I've been hearing from the American right is so dangerous to our, the fabric of our country.
So many of them now supporting, not even in defense of the American, an American war, but in defense of a foreign war.
And the argument that I hear from the more honest or the more, I guess, conscience-driven ones who are doing this, who understand that it's a contradiction of everything they've been claiming they believe, is, oh no, no, we're just doing this because it's tit-for-tat.
We want to make the American left or left liberals once, for one time, have to face what it's like to be censored given how much they've been doing it to us.
And only by doing it to us will they finally see that censorship is wrong.
Because up until now, they haven't had to be censored.
It's only us, conservatives, who have been censored.
And this is an ahistorical and false claim.
And the reason this is true is because it is the case that conservatives' speech has been targeted with a lot of repression over the past six years.
There are very few people, very few journalists, very few people in media who have stood up and criticized the attacks on the right of conservatives to speak more than I have.
On campuses, on the internet, at jobs, in media.
That's one of the reasons we cultivated part of our audience as conservatives because they appreciated the application of that principle in defense of conservative speech.
But this entire time, all these years, That left liberals have been building the censorship regime aimed at conservative voices.
It has also been a very common and pervasive form of censorship in the United States to censor Israel critics.
In academia, in media, in politics, in corporate America.
They've lost their jobs, they've been fired, they've been banned, they've been punished.
This is not some new thing that the American right is suddenly doing against the left as tit for tat.
Oh, we're finally going to show them what it's like to be censored.
This is something that's been going on for a long time.
I'm suppressing a sneeze, so we'll see if I'm able to succeed in doing that.
I don't know what you do when you have to sneeze and you're live on the air.
I think I've vanquished it for the moment.
In any event, I want to just give you a sense for what's going on, for the real historical framework for what's going on.
At the very beginning of 2023, obviously way before the Hamas attack on October 7th, talking about January of 2023, we devoted an entire show to the question of whether the American right has an Israel exception when it comes to their belief in free speech.
There you see the graphic that we used, thou shalt not criticize Israel.
You see in the background the ADL and Harvard.
Because back then there were attempts to claim that Harvard was allowing too much anti-Israel speech.
This is not new.
And you see a picture of Benjamin Netanyahu.
And our title, the title that we gave to our program was The Right's Identity Politics.
Exploiting anti-Semitism to suppress debate and defame political opponents.
And it was all about how the American right loves to believe that their opponents of identity politics, they hate how the left always accuses everybody their enemies of being racist and bigots as a way of censoring and suppressing debate and ruining people's reputations and also limiting the range of political views.
Oh no, you can't say that.
That's fascism.
We're not suppressing free speech.
We're just fighting fascism and white nationalism and racism.
And we devoted this whole show to how it is very common in some sectors of the American right to do exactly that when it comes to criticism of Israel.
To run around accusing everybody of being anti-Semite or racist, in other words.
To demand that any events at college campuses or students or professors who are anti-Israel be silenced, be barred, that events be canceled, that professors be fired.
All the things that the American right has claimed it hates when the left liberals do, many people on the right, particularly the pro-Israel right, have been doing this not recently but for many, many years now.
This is not a new thing that's being done just to give the American left a sense for what they've been doing.
This has been going on forever in the United States.
Here is a Op-ed in the Washington Post that I found very important.
And you can put the headline on the screen.
It's by Claire Finkelstein.
And she is an academic at a university.
And unlike many people on the right who are cheering censorship while pretending they're not, she admits this is the real game here.
There you see the amazing headline.
To fight anti-Semitism on campuses, we must restrict speech.
This is what people are cheering who are pressuring university professors to crack down on anti-Israel speech.
And yes, I know all the arguments that, oh, this speech is genocide, that's the reason why it has to be.
Suppressed, but as we've shown before, it is a fiction that there are huge numbers of students on college campuses running around chanting, gas the Jews, or kill all Jews, or genocide the Jews.
The United States has been engaged in the debate over the last two weeks, a hysterical debate where a manufactured crisis has been disseminated to justify censorship that there's all these students on college campuses going around chanting, gas the Jews, and genocide, this is not happening.
I've asked over 100 people in the last week to please just give me any examples of American students or students on American campuses chanting, gas the Jews or kill the Jews, and it isn't happening.
The key left-wing tactic for censorship, the left liberal tactic, is to take right-wing And say, this speech is not within the bounds of decency.
It's not real political speech.
It's fascism.
It's white nationalism.
It's racism.
It's transphobic.
And that when conservatives say their little slogans about race or LGBTs or immigrants, what they really mean is, kill all black people, kill all Trans people kill all immigrants, and that's what we're censoring.
Violent speech.
That's the left-wing tactic, to take right-wing speech, re-characterize it as fascist, white nationalist, genuinely about trying to provoke violence against minority groups, and only then saying, well, now we have to censor it.
This is exactly the tactic being used to justify censorship of Israel speech.
I hear it every day now.
Oh no, this isn't really criticism of Israel.
This is advocacy of genocide.
And it's done by taking very standard pro-Palestinian views, like calling for intifada, which is the Arabic word for uprising, or from the river to the sea, which means all Palestinians in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza should be free.
And yes, it can have a violent connotation, just like opposition to immigration might be motivated by white nationalism, but it doesn't mean it always is.
And even if it were a call for violence against Israel, that is clearly protected speech.
You're allowed to say, bomb Iran.
You're allowed to say, bomb Gaza.
You're allowed to say, use violence against Israel.
These are allowed.
We don't have an Israel exception to the First Amendment.
But this, finally, is an op-ed that is being honest about what it's actually calling for in demanding that anti-Semitism on campuses be curbed.
It's a curb on free speech.
That is what this op-ed is advocating.
Quote, we must restrict speech.
And here's the argument.
Quote, this is because the value of free speech has been elevated to a near-sacred level on university campuses.
That's considered bad.
What is this person arguing against?
That the value of free speech has been elevated to near-sacred level on campuses.
This is what we have to fight against.
Because they say, quote, as a result, universities have had to tolerate hate speech, even hate speech calling for violence against ethnic or religious minorities.
With the dramatic rise in anti-Semitism, we are discovering that this is a mistake, meaning elevating free speech.
Anti-Semitism and other forms of hate cannot be fought on university campuses without restricting poisonous speech that targets Jews and other minorities.
This is what this cause that so many conservatives are supporting is now about.
It is right here.
Anti-Semitism and other forms of hate, by which he means racism, transphobia, xenophobia, cannot be fought on university campuses without restricting speech.
Do you see how people who think they're doing this tit-for-tat against leftists or liberals are really just strengthening these people who want to censor?
The establishment in the United States is pro-Israel.
You're not getting back at the establishment.
They're happy to censor Israel critics because they're so pro-Israel.
These are the people on campuses who are getting strengthened by these conservative calls for restrictions on speech on campus.
She goes on, "With or without the First Amendment calls for genocide against Jews or even proxies for such sentiments, students, such as calling for intifada or the elimination of Israel by chanting from the river to the sea, are, in the present context, calls for a violence against a discrete ethnic or religious group.
Such speech arguably incites violence, frequently inspires harassment of Jewish students, and without question creates a hostile environment that can impair the equal opportunity of Jewish students.
Do you see that as the left liberal censorship case verbatim?
Just replace Jewish students with black students, or trans students, or Latinos, or gay students, or Muslim students, and you have the censorship regime that has been created.
What they're trying to do is now to say, we were happy to include Jews in that, that way we can censor even more.
This is Claire Finkelstein, a tenured professor of law and philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, where all these controversies are taking place.
She's unbelievably a member of the school's Open Expression Committee and chair of the law school's Committee on Academic Freedom.
And she's just saying outright, we're taking these conservative calls to use it as an opportunity to impose even more censorship.
Now, as I said, none of this is new.
Left-wing Palestinian defenders have been among the most censored people in the United States for many years, along with conservative speakers.
Here is The Guardian, back in 2007.
It's talking about 15 years ago now, 16 years ago.
University denies tenure to outspoken Holocaust academic.
This is about Norman Finkelstein.
What had happened was, Norman Finkelstein was teaching at DePaul University.
He was a very well-known scholar.
He had written scholarly books, obviously very critical of Israel, and Jewish activist groups, like Holocaust groups that he said were exploiting the Holocaust to prevent criticism of Israel.
But his scholarship was well-regarded.
He had the approval of his tenure committee.
And Alan Dershowitz, the fanatical Israel supporter, went on a crusade To get tenure denied to Norman Finkelstein because he is an outspoken critic of Israel and Dershowitz won.
Finkelstein got his tenure denied and he's barely taught at any school since.
One of the most rancorous disputes in American academia has ended with a prominent political scientist with controversial views on Israel and anti-Semitism being denied tenure at one of the country's largest universities.
Does this sound like it's new?
A political scientist with controversial views on Israel being denied tenure at one of the largest universities?
This is not tit-for-tat what is being done now.
This is just a repetition of what's been going on in the United States for many years when it comes to criticism, to punishment and censorship of Israel critics.
Norman Finkelstein, author of The Holocaust Industry, now has less than a year remaining on his contract with the Political Science Department of DePaul University in Chicago.
He lost his bid for a lifelong post after a 4-3 vote at the Promotions and Tenure Board.
Mr. Finkelstein has argued in his books that claims of anti-Semitism are used to dampen down criticisms of his Israeli policy toward the Palestinians, and that the Holocaust is exploited by some Jewish institutions for their own gain.
Mr. Finkelstein, the son of Holocaust survivors, he is obviously not advocating the genocide of Jews, has responded to the decision to, in effect, sack him from his job at DePauw by condemning the vote as an act of political aggression.
Quote, I met the standards of tenure DePauw required, but it wasn't enough to overcome the political opposition to my speaking out on the Israel-Palestine conflict.
Here, seven years later, in 2014, from the New York Times, Professor's angry tweets on Gaza cost him a job.
Quote, the trustees at the University of Illinois voted on Thursday to block the appointment of Steven Salasha, a Palestinian-American professor who had been offered a tenured position last year, following a campaign by pro-Israel students, faculty members, and donors Who contended that his Twitter comments on the bombardment of Gaza this summer were anti-Semitic.
Quote, hate speech is never acceptable for those applying for a tenured position.
Incitement to violence is never acceptable, Josh Cooper, a college senior who collected 1,300 signatures on a petition against the appointment, told the trustees before the vote.
The student, a former intern for AIPAC, The American-Israel Public Action Committee added that, quote, there must be a relationship between free speech and civility.
Several of the comments that supporters of Israel took exception to referred to parallels Mr. Saleh has drawn in his work between the experiences of North Americans and Palestinians.
Now, you can disagree with that parallel.
You can disagree with Steven Saleh's criticism of Israel's bombing of Gaza in 2014.
But the idea that he should be denied tenure like Norman Finkelstein was, because of his criticism of Israel, is insanity.
And yet, that is the norm on American college campuses.
The Jewish student group that demanded he have his tenure withdrawn explicitly cited the need to be safe on campus.
They said it's not a question of censoring, it's a question of being safe on campus.
The American Right goes around mercilessly mocking students who say they need to be safe on campus by having views they dislike, censored, or professors who disagree with them fired.
And yet, in this case, barely anyone on the American Right defended Professor Salacia because they have an Israel acceptance of free speech.
Many do on the American Right.
That is not new.
That has been going on for many years.
Here in Salon in 2010, I wrote about the firing by a long-time CNN producer, Octavia Nasr.
She had been a CNN employee for 20 years and was instantly fired because an imam who was linked to Hezbollah died and she expressed condolences to the people who followed him.
And all sorts of Israel supporters said, you can't have a journalist working like this.
And CNN fired her overnight.
Helen Thomas, for those of you who may not remember, was one of the most famous and accomplished White House journalists in the country.
She was the first woman to cover the White House in the 60s.
She was a mainstay at every press conference going back to JFK and LBJ and Nixon and Ford and Reagan.
I mean, just she was an institution.
And she had Palestinian descent.
And in 2010, she said that she was fired.
Here you see White House columnist Helen Thomas resigns after telling Jews, quote, go home.
Now, she wasn't telling Jews in America to go home.
She was telling Jews in Israel to go home.
Helen Thomas, a veteran columnist for Hearst newspapers, announced her resignation today, shortly after the White House condemned her remarks about Jews as, quote, offensive and reprehensible.
That's the Obama White House.
Thomas caused an uproar with recent remarks that Jews should, quote, get the hell out of Palestine and go home to Poland, Germany, America, and anywhere else.
She was like 90 at the time, by the way.
I think she should and has apologized, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said at the daily briefing today.
Obviously, those remarks do not reflect certainly the opinion of, I assume, most of the people in here and certainly not of the Obama administration.
Just case after case after case after case after case after case of people being fired in academia and media for criticizing Israel, for angering pro-Israel factions in the United States.
Again, support that if you want.
Try and find ways for some reason why this kind of cancel culture, why this kind of censorship is permissible.
Please don't tell me.
With the spate of censorship and cancellations since October 7th, there's something new in this country that the American right is only cheering to finally show the American left what it's like because this has been going on a long, long time.
Here's an article I wrote in The Intercept in 2016.
The headline, the greatest threat to free speech in the West, criminalizing activism against Israeli occupation.
And this is an article about how.
Before Hamas attacked Israel on October 7th using violence, there was a non-violent campaign by the Palestinians to end the occupation of the West Bank and Bukit of Gaza.
It was modeled after the boycott of South Africa in the 1980s that so many American students joined and then other students around the world, and it helped bring down the apartheid regime of South Africa.
And the Palestinians said, we would like you to boycott Israel, a non-violent action.
to end the occupation.
And what Western Europe did was basically made it illegal, illegal to protest against Israeli occupation.
They defined the boycott movement as inherently anti-Semitic.
And they banned it on that ground.
And here in 2016, I was describing as the greatest threat to free speech in the West, the attempt to criminalize action against Israeli occupation.
Here is from 2018 the free speech group FIRE.org, which really became popular, known because they were defending the free speech rights of American conservative students on college campuses at a time when nobody else would, including often the ACLU.
And it became very popular among conservatives.
And we've shown you how they're one of the few consistent free speech groups.
They have vehemently condemned Ram Dassantis for trying to ban a pro-Palestinian group on the University of Florida campus, claiming that they were engaged in material support for terrorism, even though all they did was exercise free speech.
They recently condemned the Democratic governor of New York, Kathy Hochul, for trying to bully state schools in New York into censoring more to protect Israel.
But back in 2018, When Fordham University, a New York school, tried to ban the Students for Justice in Palestine, FIRE.org intervened on their behalf, defended them in a lawsuit, and condemned this as a grave attack on free speech.
This is not since October 7th, this is back in 2016.
In 2015, the Center for Constitutional Rights prepared a report That was entitled, The Palestine Exception to Free Speech, A Movement Under Attack in the United States.
And I use this report a lot in my reporting.
And it concluded the following, quote, this report released by the Center for Constitutional Rights and Palestine Legal in September 2015 documents for the first time the widespread and growing suppression Between January 2014 and June 2015, Palestine Legal responded to nearly 300 incidents of suppression.
Between January 2014 and June 2015, Palestine Legal responded to nearly 300 incidents of suppression.
85% of those incidents targeted students and professors on a total of more than 65 US college campuses.
This trend has significant implications for both the First Amendment and democratic principles, like academic freedom, not to mention the mission of higher education to help develop critical thinking.
The report outlines the tactics, including event cancellations, baseless legal complaints, administrative disciplinary actions, firing, and false and inflammatory accusations of terrorism and anti-Semitism that Israel advocacy organizations, universities, government actors, and other institutions have used against pro-Palestinian activists.
It also contains testimony from advocates who have been targeted for their speech or expression and includes an index more than 50 campus-related case studies.
In 2018, here is from NBC News, Marc Lamont Hill was fired from CNN after he gave a speech criticizing Israel.
And he had to say, I don't support anti-Semitism.
I don't support killing Jewish people.
I simply support the movement for Palestinian rights, but he was fired by CNN.
Now, you would be very hard-pressed, by the way, to find any similar examples of pro-Israel advocates being fired from their jobs.
Just like since October 7th, almost every person fired for speaking about the Israel-Gaza war or who was canceled or had events canceled by institutions under pressure from big donors.
It's almost all entirely in one direction.
The people being silenced and fired and canceled are pro-Palestinian advocates, people who do criticize the Israeli government and its actions in Gaza.
Almost none.
Defending Israel.
The only example I know, and there may be a couple others, but it's so lopsided, is a UCLA professor who confronted pro-Palestinian students who are protesting in defense of Palestine and said something like, kill them all, kill all Hamas.
And I think he was placed on leave or suspended pending an investigation, and I denounce that as repressive.
Because I'm not a free speech hypocrite, I actually believe in free speech.
I don't only say that when it's views that I agree with that are being targeted.
But overwhelmingly, it's been pro-Palestinian advocates who are being censored and silenced, and that's not new.
That's been going on for more than a couple decades in the United States.
As we all know, Ben Shapiro is a fanatical defender of free speech.
He loves free speech so much.
You cannot abide censorship.
When Marc Lamont Hill was fired by CNN for his criticisms of Israel, Ben Shapiro went on to Daily Wire shortly thereafter, and he defended CNN.
Ben Shapiro did.
Why is CNN's firing of Marc Lamont Hill was right?
Can you believe it?
Ben Shapiro, his defense of free speech, ends at criticism of Israel, just like his opposition to affirmative action ends at setting aside jobs for Jews.
It is incredibly easy to cut off all empathy for other minority groups of which you're not a part.
Oh, those little black people are whining about feeling oppressed on college campuses.
Oh, those trans people are whining about feeling unsafe because of someone from our network saying, I believe in the eradication of transgenderism from society.
Those poor little babies, they need to toughen up.
Do they need a little therapy dog or a safe space or a blanket?
So easy to mock the grievances of other groups to which you don't belong.
Now when it's your group that's suddenly saying, oh no, we feel unsafe, we feel besieged by this speech.
Then you turn around and say, oh yeah, CNN, good job for getting rid of that Israel critic.
Fire him, fire more of them.
This is something that Is a long time coming.
Now, I have talked before about the efforts to require, as a condition for being hired by the state, a pledge that people signed saying, we don't support a boycott of Israel.
I've done a lot of reporting on it.
Here is a New Yorker article.
Andrew Cuomo had This always amazes me.
Andrew Cuomo, as governor of New York, ordered a boycott of North Carolina and a boycott of Indiana.
Each of them had enacted a bathroom bill requiring that citizens use the bathroom that corresponds with their biological sex at birth to prevent trans women from using women's bathrooms, to prevent trans men from using men's bathrooms.
And in response, Andrew Cuomo ordered a boycott of those two states.
He ordered New York State employees not to travel to Indiana or North Carolina unless it was essential.
So he was fine with boycotting other American states.
But then he turned around and said, if you boycott a state of Israel, we're going to boycott you.
You cannot be hired by our state if you support a boycott of Israel.
And many red state governors also Enacted law is saying if you want to have a contract with our state, you have to sign a pledge saying you don't support a boycott of Israel.
You can support a boycott of any other country.
Chile, Uruguay, Indonesia, Japan, wherever you want.
The Netherlands, boycott them if you want, just don't boycott Israel.
Boycott American states as well.
Inflict damage on the economy of your own country, just not Israel.
That's off limits.
And thankfully, every court that has looked at this has ruled it unconstitutional, and yet 25 red state legislatures and governors, along with Andrew Cuomo, passed it.
Here in October of 2017, the ACLU noted that a city in Texas told people that they would not get aid from Hurricane Harvey, which decimated parts of Texas, unless they sign this vow not to boycott Israel.
Quote, the city's website says that it is accepting applications from individuals and businesses for grants from money donated for Hurricane Relief.
The application says that by signing it, the applicant verifies that the applicant, one, does not boycott Israel, and two, will not boycott Israel during the term of this agreement.
We profiled in 2017-18 a woman who's an American citizen.
She has four American children all born here.
She worked as a speech pathologist for the Austin School District and she specialized in speech deficiencies of kids whose first language was Arabic or I think it was just Arabic.
And she had Perfect job evaluations for the 10 years that she worked for Texas.
They renewed her contract every year.
And then suddenly under this law, she got the new contract and there was an appendix to it that required her to sign a pledge saying, I do not support a boycott of Israel.
The problem is she does support a boycott of Israel.
She doesn't believe in buying Israeli goods until the occupation of the West Bank ends.
You don't have to agree with that.
It's obviously the prerogative of an American citizen to boycott a foreign country.
And because she didn't sign it, she lost her job.
She sued.
The court ruled in her favor and said that there was an unconstitutional deprivation of free speech.
Now, just to underscore the point, on October 6, 2023, so one day before the Hamas attack, I saw that there was a controversy at the University of Pennsylvania.
Whose president was just fired.
Namely that there was a Palestinian literary festival with Palestinian writers that were coming to the campus of Penn.
A student group had invited them and they were going to appear on Penn's campus.
And a lot of major donors, pro-Israel donors, The ones who just succeeded in getting the President of Penn fired, objected and demanded the President of Penn cancel this Palestinian literary event.
But one of the reasons this President of Penn was hired just last year in 2022 is she's a constitutional lawyer and was known as a free speech advocate.
And she said, I'm not going to cancel a pro-Palestinian, a pro-Palestinian literary event because you don't like some of the writers.
Feel free to invite writers who disagree with them.
That's what college is for.
And that was when a lot of donors started demanding she be fired, before October 7th.
And when I saw that on October 6th, the day before the Hamas attack, I went on Twitter and I said the following, quote, for far too many people who claim to be free speech absolutists, their convictions die as they arrive at the Israel-Palestine issue.
Those who mock, quote, hate speech as a censorship justification suddenly start invoking it.
You can't make exceptions for your favorite causes.
And I said that because of my long history of reporting on and denouncing this Israel exception to free speech and Israel exceptions to the First Amendment that some pro-Israel factions on the American right harbor.
This is not new.
So if you want to support censorship of Israel critics, if you want to empower this censorship industrial regime that's more than happy to have the support of people on the right now, go ahead and do that.
Just please don't claim that this is some new thing that's being done to show American leftists once and for all what it's like to be censored.
They already know.
Censorship aimed at Israel critics is a very common form of censorship that has been taking place in the United States for a very long time.
And being a consistent free speech defender means that you oppose that every bit as much as you oppose censorship of right-wing speech.
And I'm happy to say that there are some conservatives who have been doing that.
Provoking a lot of anger from the right-wing followings when they do.
Unfortunately, though, they're the minority.
They're the exception.
And we are now seeing the American right, parts of the American right, as Tucker Carlson said, that had been in the vanguard of defending free speech, suddenly now turning around and abandoning that, cheering censorship in the name of protecting this foreign country.
And I do not see, I don't understand how people like Ben Shapiro, Barry Weiss, Dave Rubin, any of these people doing this, will ever have credibility again.
When they pretend they are offended by censorship in the future, when it's not directed this time at views that they hate, but views that they like, I certainly won't regard them as credible.
So that concludes our show for this evening.
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